The Tribune

Nico Scavella joins 650 students for a rare opportunity to hear haunting tales of World War Two persecution and prejudice . . .

A HOLOCAUST survivor yesterday encouraged Bahamians not to hold prejudicial or discriminatory views towards any one group of people, as she recounted the anti-Semitic actions taken against Jews by Nazi Germany that led to her imprisonment as a part of what is considered to be the worst genocide in history.

Eva Schloss, best friend and stepsister of famed Holocaust diarist Anne Frank, called on Bahamians far and wide to “treat each other like human beings”, adding that her personal experiences during the Holocaust only add emphasis to her view that “it doesn’t make a difference if you have a different religion, different colour, come from a different country”.

“I’ve noticed there’s lots of different churches here,” Mrs Schloss said to a full room of students at the Melia Nassau Beach Hotel. “People should visit each other in church, and see that basically we’re all just the same. There’s just really one race, the human race, and it doesn’t make a difference if you have a different religion, a different colour, come from a different country.

“So it is important that we treat each other like human beings and that’s all that matters, that we’re humans, and that’s it.”

Around 650 pupils from nine primary and high schools in New Providence listened attentively to her story.

Mrs Schloss, 87, was born in Vienna, Austria, and ultimately moved to the Netherlands after the annexation of Austria by Germany, led by dictator Adolf Hitler. The Nazis invaded the Netherlands in 1940, and Mrs Schloss said almost immediately there were “restrictions” against Jews.

“We had to wear the yellow star, we were not on public transport, we had to leave our schools and go to Jewish schools, we were not allowed to go out after 8 o’clock, we had to buy food from particular shops, and it became difficult to get food, so that became very, very hard,” she said. “Then they started to pick up people from the streets. Once you wore the star, they knew you were a Jew and they just disappeared. So it became very, very scary.”

In 1942, she said about 10,000 young people between the ages of 16 and 25 received the call-up notice to be deported to Germany. However, she said “many parents,” including Anne Frank’s father, Otto, as well as her father, Erich Geiringer, “decided they wouldn’t send the young people”.

Mrs Schloss said she was 13 when Mr Geiringer told her and her family that they would go into hiding, but would do so in pairs: Mrs Schloss with her mother, Elfriede, and Mr Geiringer with her brother, Heinz. Mrs Schloss said the rationale given by her father for the decision was “if we are in two different places the chance that two of us will survive becomes bigger”.

On her 15th birthday in 1944, and after two years of hiding and constantly moving to “about six or seven different hiding places,” Mrs Schloss and her family were captured by German soldiers and taken to the Auschwitz concentration camps.

She and her mother managed to survive the ordeal after being rescued by Soviet troops in 1945, but her father and brother did not. She was also informed that Anne Frank, her elder sister Margot, and their mother Edith Frank had perished in the concentration camps, with Mr Frank as the lone survivor from that family.

Recounting her ordeal, Mrs Schloss lamented the prejudicial conditions she faced growing up in Austria, and ultimately those that led to the eventual persecution of some 2.7 million Jews during the Holocaust.

“Austria is a Catholic country, and I had Catholic friends and suddenly I was not allowed to play anymore with those kids,” she said. “And I was nine years old and I couldn’t understand why am I different, what difference does it make? We have to accept that we’re all human beings and we all have to live together.”

She added: “When I came back from Auschwitz, everybody was saying never again … those were terrible atrocities, that (should) never ever be repeated. But now certainly 70 years later, unfortunately, it’s not the same of course, but it is similar.

“There’s still terrible prejudice, there are terrible wars going on, people are being killed, and very often for the same reason the Holocaust happened, for prejudice against people who have a different religion, are different races, and this is really what we fight against.”

Nonetheless, Mrs Schloss expressed optimism that prejudice and discrimination are both issues that are being prioritised the world over.

“I think people are aware of it more now and talk about it,” she said. “Before it was just prejudice and that’s it. But now it’s a subject, it’s taught in school, so I have great hopes that we’ll get over it. And there’s lots of mixed marriages. In London you see a lot of mixed marriages, and I think eventually people will accept each other.”

Mrs Schloss also went on to describe her friendship with Anne Frank while growing up in Amsterdam prior to the war. Mrs Schloss eventually became Anne’s stepsister after Mrs Geiringer married Mr Frank after each lost their spouses to the Holocaust.

“She was quite different from me,” Mrs Schloss said of her deceased friend and stepsister. “You have heard she left her home in Germany when she was four years old, so she had not experienced prejudice and bullying, but I had already experienced in Vienna and Belgium, prejudice against me because I was a Jew.

“I was shy but she was very much outgoing. She was a big chatterbox. Her nickname was ‘Mrs Quack-Quack’ because she never stopped talking.

“We knew each other for two years, we saw each other daily, she went actually to a special school, Montessori School, and I was in the ordinary school, but after school we met daily every day, and she took me up to her apartment to meet her family because I couldn’t speak Dutch yet, and her father and mother spoke German, which was a great help to me.

“But later when we had to go away into hiding, I never ever saw her again.”

Anne Frank was a German-born diarist and writer who gained fame posthumously following the publication of ‘The Diary of a Young Girl’, which documents her life in hiding from 1942 to 1944, during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II. She died at 15.

Students attended the private presentation from Genesis Academy, Lyford Cay International School, Meridian School, Queen’s College, Simpson Penn Centre for Boys, St Andrew’s School, Willie Mae Pratt Centre for Girls, Windsor Preparatory School and Xavier’s Lower School. They were able to ask plenty of questions to satisfy their curiosity.

“I felt great about the encouraging words she said,” said a student of the Willie Mae Pratt Centre for Girls. “I was encouraged to know that she never gave up. It made me realise that I have to be grateful for what I have. The time and things that she lived through, I don’t think I could survive that so it really encouraged me to never give up and always, always keep hope.”

The programme was organised by the Nassau Jewish Community. Mrs Schloss will speak at a free public forum ‘Beyond the Diary’ this evening at the Melia, at 6.30.

nscavella@

tribunemedia.net